Tacitus, Annals, 15.20­-23, 33­-45. Latin Text, Study Aids with Vocabulary, and Commentary, 2013a

moral pollution of these men. The memorable and scything phrase sums
up the company Nero kept: it is a paraded on-the-nail quotation from
Horace’s famous ‘Cleopatra Ode’ (Ode 1.37.6–10): 145
... dum Capitolio
regina dementis ruinas
funus et imperio parabat
contaminato cum grege turpium,
morbo virorum.
[... while the queen | was plotting mindless ruin for the | Capitoline and an
end to Empire, | among her pervert company of disease- | polluted ‘males.’]
As Tony Woodman explains, this allusion to Horace clinches Tacitus’
subliminal transformation of Rome into Alexandria: ‘Horace was referring to
the eunuchs who were conventionally associated with Egypt in the ancient
world; and in his ode their leader, being a woman (regina), is an appropriate
analogue to Nero, who in his wedding to Pythagoras adopts the female role.
Yet Cleopatra was not only a woman but queen of, precisely, Alexandria.’ 146
The allusion, then, achieves an identification of malicious ingenuity: Nero is
Cleopatra, the king of Rome has turned into the queen of Egypt. 147 There is a
further, sinister dimension to the Horatian intertext. His poem is, after all, a
victory ode that celebrates a Roman triumph over an alien queen who tried to
reduce Rome to ruins. Yet especially with the account of the fire coming up,
Tacitus strongly implies that Nero succeeded where Cleopatra failed – Rome,
in Horace’s words, has become ‘polluted’, an empire has indeed come to ‘an
end.’ We are, in other words, faced with another inversion, this time at the
literary level: whereas Horace, writing under Augustus, composed a victory
ode of joy, relief, and celebration that, in exorcising a threat from the East,
looks forward to a bright future, Tacitus’ narrative, which here chronicles the
crimes of the last scion of the dynasty, who undoes or even reverses Augustus’
victory of West over East, offers an obituary on Julio-Claudian Rome, which
collapses in onto itself: in a monstrous spectacle of imperial history returning
to its beginnings, Nero is Augustus, Antony, and Cleopatra all in one.
145 We cite the translation of Guy Lee, Horace: Odes & Carmen Saeculare, with an English
version in the original metres, introduction and notes, Leeds 1998.
146 Woodman (1998) 181.
147 Woodman (1998) 184 further draws attention that Cleopatra’s last Roman lover, Mark
Antony – a distant ancestor of Nero no less! – was accused by Cicero of a homosexual
marriage ‘in very similar terms to those used by Tacitus about Nero’: see Philippic 2.44.